If you want to be happy in your life (and who doesn’t actually) you must first change entirely the way you look at some things. Ready? Let’s go and analyze the 6 core concepts of happiness and the truth behind each one of them.
Myth #1: Happiness: you either have it or not
Genes play an important role in the feeling of happiness. In fact, researchers suggest that heredity contributes 50% to someone’s happiness.
This percentage is the one that actually demolishes the first myth. In fact since 50% is heredity, the remaining 50% is the happiness that someone can seek and create.
The effort and the desire for happiness are able to create the conditions of a cheerful life. Harmonious and healthy interpersonal relationships, acts of kindness, daily exercise and meditation are just some of the things that may lead you to the conquest of happiness, even if you don’t “have” it from your ancestors.
Myth #2: Happiness is a destination
This phrase is almost forced. By urging ourselves to seek happiness in everything we do, all we end up with is getting ourselves stressed about a virtual situation, which we are unable to create.
The social conditions of living together, a good job, a nice house, can contribute to the picture of a happy person, but they are just pieces of a puzzle and not the whole picture.
Happiness is not an emotional end to the struggle of someone’s life. It is a beneficial path over time, building itself harmonically and functionally during a person’s daily life.
Myth #3: Be content with your happiness
The truth is that most people, tend to adopt the positive changes in their life and rename them as “happiness”. Adaptation is good but a little too much. In reality what is happening, is exactly the opposite.
The car or the home of your dreams, for example, can offer you a temporary feeling of satisfaction, but this can’t in any way be considered as happiness.
Myth #4: Misery always overcomes happiness
Negative feelings, according to the specialists, have a strong effect on humans. These feelings are temporary and “tell” the body to find the problem and fix it while the positive ones, win over time, because they allow the body to exploit everything it has tried to create.
Research has in fact shown that as positive emotions increase, there comes a point where negative emotions have no significant impact on someone’s life. In a nutshell, positive emotions clearly cannot foresee or prevent the negative ones, so as not to affect you, but simply on the long term, positive emotions can protect you from the consequences of the negative ones.
Myth #5: Happiness means pleasure
There are many more things involved in the conquest of happiness by the sense of personal satisfaction and pleasure.
For example, offering help to others creates a feeling of happiness and in fact, as surveys suggest, it can even sooth physical pain by 13 %.
In the early 1990s it was recorded for the first time, that the increase in the levels of mood through help that someone offers to another person, is associated with the release of serotonin endorphines (natural opiate substances of the body) and of oxytocin, a “hormone of compassion”, which further strengthens the behavior towards help offering.
Myth #6: There is only one happiness
If you’re one of those who seek magical elixirs of happiness, you are most likely to be completely disappointed. There are no solutions or recipes for happiness and in any event, happiness doesn’t have only one representation.
On the contrary it is composed by moments, which like the pieces of well made puzzle, are completed slowly over time.
Exercise, a good lunch, a healthy lifestyle, hanging out with friends and simple everyday walks with your partner are moments of happiness, which add their own “touch” in the big picture.
